I leave for two weeks and you all accidentally the market. I was not able the participate in the Odyssey speculation, but I am enjoying catching up on it.

The wild swings that we are seeing in the Moon and Ice markets due to Odyssey adjustments made me reflect on the stability of the items that I trade.

I used my historical database to come up with a report to provide quantitative insight to help give values to the items that I instinctively know are high risk. Here is a snapshot of the lower and upper items listed in my Stability Report that covers three years of trading sorted by standard deviation (σ).

Here are some general observations about the items listed:

Basic minerals, ammo, and modules are the most stable.

Capital modules weigh in somewhere in the middle.

Tech2 ships fill the upper band of the report.

Tech3 hulls and associated Subsystems are randomly spread over the middle band.

Certain battleships are high on the report because their popularity has changed over time due to shifting fleet doctrines.

The Procurer BPO was an item that I speculated on heavily during the last patch, which netted very positive results.

Capital ships are subject to large swings due to mineral price changes.

A tenant of becoming a good trader is minimizing your risk while trying to maximize your rewards. My advice for new traders is to work with more stable items as shown in the shaded green area of my report; they are subject to less swing and therefore will help minimize risk. As your ISK resources grow, you can move into riskier items that will [hopefully] yield larger returns.

Along with the rebalancing the roles of the mining barges, their mineral requirements were also adjusted. The build requirements for the Tech 1 barges about doubled and therefore the BPO NPC price was adjusted to reflect the new value.

Here is my research on buying Procurer BPOs at pre-Inferno 1.2 prices to sell after the patch.

[Aug 9 update] It looks like CCP changed the NPC price in the Inferno 1.2.1 patch.

ORE Space

Since these BPOs are only seeded in the Outer Ring in two ORE stations, I was able to get a good view on how many were bought by using the market window.

Out of normal BPO purchases in ORE space amounted to 1,264 units starting in late July.

Patch Changes

CCP changed the values before going live. They had a different number published on the Test server and knowingly seeded a different value on the live server. *shakes fist*

Other Barges

I looked considered the increase in BPO price, the new role, market velocity, and added in a little bit of my own gut feeling. This showed that the Procurer BPO was the item with the most potential for profit.

ISK Injection

Given that these were purchased for 450 M and are now worth 0.508 B 0.838 B that means 73.3 B 491 B was created from nothing, or about 0.3% 2% of the normal 24 T ISK faucet amount stated in the 2012 Fanfest presentation. This amount doesn’t seem too noteworthy.

Speculating on Profits

In 76 days about 124 pre-Inferno 1.2 Procurer BPOs moved in Jita slightly above their NPC price of 450 M. If 1,264 out of normal units and around 561 move in Jita in the same time period, that means it will take about 1,118 days (3.06 years) for this stock to clear assuming that demand remains the same.

Twenty BPOs

I bought 20 Procurer BPOs at the old NPC price for a total investment of 9 B. Taking in account the new price of 0.508 B 0.838 B, we can value them at 10.16 B 16.8 B. This shows a 1.16 B 7.76 B increase in the NPC value of the items. I was expecting more profit, but that’s what you get when you speculate on patch day.

I have a few options on how to turn a profit with the BPOs:

Sell them in Jita. I believe that due to the market saturation with pre-Inferno 1.2 prints, it will be a while before we start to see the new NPC cost in Jita of 0.508 B 0.838 B + a good margin. I could slowly sell the stock off as prices rise.

Improve value by researching them and then sell.

Produce BPCs for invention/manufacturing. As of this writing, there are not a lot of BPCs available on the open market.

I plan on doing all three to help spread the risk and start to get a return on this speculation adventure.

Speculation had driven up the price of barges to the new expected price after the 1.2 patch, but the BPO on Tranquility still had the original requirements.

We purchased 3x Procurer and 1x Retriever BPOs, found empty build slots a few jumps out from Jita, and began to build. Even selling directly to buy order gave us a good return on the simple Tech 1 construction. We moved 288x Procurer and 45x Retriever ships since the announcement of the barge changes and still have some stock left over made with the pre-Inferno 1.2 BPOs.

A while ago CCP Diagoras posted some statistics on Twitter for the percentage of items that come from Invention vs Tech 2 BPOs to help quell the tinfoil hat theories that Tech 2 BPOs control the entire market. I recorded and sorted the tweets, but never released them.

What does this mean for you as an inventor looking at the market? Well, you will most likely want to stay away from the red items as the Tech 2 BPO owners have a stronger control on the price and can undercut you below your profitability threshold.

If you are interested in further Tech 2 BPO research that I have conducted, take a look at the T2 BPO Returns post.

This time around I planned to actually participate in hulkageddon. So, about a week and a half ago I made two fresh alts, joined them to my main corp and started their skillplans, going for thermodynamics, drone interfacing and the support skills. Then bought 70 thoraxes in jita and 70 thorax fits in Dodixie (thanks missioners!). Three hours before hulkageddon 3 starts, I realize that hulkageddon is going to start in three hours when I thought it was about eight hours away. Unfortunatley, I’m in the middle of garden chores for my grandmother.

One hour, four holly bushes and three car chases later I was at home. I booted up my two laptops, plan in mind. The theory was, I’d appear in system in an orca and two pods, warp to a station. Fit two thoraxes using the station system, put the fitted thoraxes in the maint bay. Warp to a safe, drop combat probes over the belts, pin a hulk, board and warp the thoraxes as fast as possible, land, gank, victory.

I’ve had…difficulties.

So, once I get home, I check evemon on the two characters I’ve been training. One has finished everything but drones V, and the other has finished everything except for Engineering V. Oh, and Gallente frigate IV.

Oops >.>

So, I get one of my nullsec alts, skilled entirely for a logistics BS droneboat. I start him training med hybrid turret, install a JC in the nullsec station I’m sitting in and pod myself back to empire. One hurtle over.

Then it comes to the orca. For those who just downloaded capsuleer or have short term memory loss, my Orca violently exploded completely due to my own idiocy and half-asleepness. For those not in my corp, we have a t1 replacement policy. For those who aren’t a close personal friend of mine, I’m half British. Thus when my CEO contracted me a new Orca for free, I felt horrendously guilty. Not enough to not use the Orca in stupid/risky scenarios, but still, guilty. Anywho, I found the orca on my main account and contracted it to my orca pilot who was currently working as a BS logistics pilot in null. Orca pilot installs JC in null station, pods herself, back to empire. Update clone, accept orca contract…..

I immidiatley buy whatever meta inertial stabalizers are avaliable in station, slap em on and light a fire under my 30-second align time hull. Half an hour later, I arrive in jita and start fitting the orca for cargo and combat probes.

Well… we as the WH and nullsec miners of Eve have kinda screwed ourselves over with this. Most nerds players who read this blog probably already know why mega prices are currently in the hypothetical shitter of a race of toilet-people, but for those who enjoy shooting things in their spare time, let me give a general summary. I’m not a marketeer, but I like to think of myself as knowing at least a little.

6 Month Megacyte Prices

Insurance on everything T1 is essentially a cap on how low mineral prices can fall, because once the mineral and manufacturing costs of say, a Drake goes below that threshold, industrialists blow their products up for ISKies. The clever way the eve economy has found around this little cap is an overflow of mega and zyd, via WH space and nullsec.

There are two three types of miners, the risky miner, the safe miner, and the macro miner. The safe miner is content to sit in highsec and mine veldspar all day, safe(mostly) and making reliable ISK. The risky miner goes to WH space or nullsec and mines the best ore. The macro miner sits and mines veld automatically in a way so nerfarious that it’s undetectable by CCP.

In any case, this system used to work because there was not very much ABC avaliable. Miners had two choices, to mine in highsec or join a nullsec alliance that operated deep in nullsec for ABC. Then came Apocrypha, with its WHs. Initially, the combatants of Eve went in and carved a oily swath through the sleeper population, idly noting the presence of ABC roids amist the floating sleeper arms and limbs that they grafted together to make T3 cruisers.

After Mr. Wizz-bang-shooty-fun had essentially reduced the sleeper population into little flying bags of ISK with Hadoken beams, Mr. Industrialist perked up his ears at the mentions of ABC. And so the miners who were given a choice between working for peanuts and working for nullsec alliances chose….rapture I mean WH mining.

After the first few tentative steps in which the miners learned how not to die, stopped using T2 rigs and faction boosters on their mining vessels, they started mining. Quite a bit. This mining operation reached full swing about the same time Dominion came out, and with it nullsec roids. Not ordinary nullsec roids, however. These roids… were infinite. In all fairness, WH roids are infinite too, if you know how to work it.

So essentially, everyone who was bored with highsec mining(90% of the highsec mining population, excluding macro miners) went to the new nullsec belts or W-space, and about…half of them got shot to hell so quickly and efficiently that they went straight back to highsec. Those who remained, with large piles of the best roids in Eve, quickly turned those into large piles of ISK, so quickly that they were having to import Tritanium from highsec to build stuff, which was viable because they could spend an hour mining Bistot and buy three hours worth of Tritanium.

Unfortunatley, the WH miners, being unable to focus on making ships because of lack of stations, safety, ectera, couldn’t make ships, so they carted their mega and zydrine to Jita and sold it, possibly more than the market could handle, at about the same time that tritanium was being bought in droves by the nullsecers. All of this has shifted the balance of nullsec/highsec ores towards tritanium, increasing it’s worth until enough people say “f- it” to null and WH mining to increase the rarity of mega and zydrine so the price goes back up so people go back into WHs and nullsec so the price goes back down so….

ect, ect, ect.

So, who here that mines in null or WH is gonna wuss out first? ABC prices have dropped to about 60% of what they were last summer, and the price is gonna keep goin down. Or it won’t. Or maybe it will. Who knows?

6 Month Zydrine Prices

All I know is, I’m not moving from W-space. They’re no rats here, no can flippers, and the roids don’t explode after two or three cycles. You control who can come in and out of your WH, to a degree, and wardecs mean nothing. My corp’s in a wardec atm, and we’re still mining away juuust fine, w/ rorqual support even. It’s everything nullsec, but without a cap fleet breathing down your neck.

January was the month of new ships for my characters. My main got into a Thanatos (Gallente Carrier) while my alt got into an Obelisk (Gallente Freighter). Here are some screenshots of their maiden voyage, mining in WH space (as always), and some attempted ganks by WH pirates.